Venezuela electricity chaos adds to people’s woes

Maracaibo / AFP

Carmela de la Hoz sent a customer away with his hair half cut when the power went off in her salon. The customer will be back — but so will the blackouts.
The rolling electricity cuts the Venezuelan government ordered across the country starting this week have hit the city of Maracaibo hard.
Security forces are patrolling the streets to prevent unrest following reports of looting in Maracaibo and other towns, a sign that Venezuela’s economic crisis is close to boiling point. In their green uniforms, they guard subways and entrances to supermarkets where locals queue for hundreds of meters to buy rations of food and supplies.
Citizens have already been short of basic goods for months. Now the power cuts prompted by an electricity shortage are driving locals to despair.
“This is a disaster,” De la Hoz said. “We can’t live here.”
“How can I work without electricity? How can I pay my five employees and rent the premises?”

Blackouts & burnouts
The city is home to an old fishing community beside the Maracaibo lake that gives onto Venezuela’s northern gulf in the Caribbean. It lies near one of the world’s biggest oil reserves. They once helped fuel an economic boom, but the price of the oil has plunged, slashing the state’s revenues, and critics say the government has failed to provide economic alternatives.
President Nicolas Maduro says a drought has dried up Venezuela’s hydroelectric dams. His opponents say his government has mismanaged the entire power network. Maduro announced four hours of power cuts a day for 40 days from Monday.
While blackouts have not been enforced in the capital Caracas, poor families in cities like Maracaibo are suffering the consequences.
The former head of the state electricity utility, Miguel Lara, told AFP he considers the blackout plan technically flawed, saying the cuts would be followed by periods of high use that would saturate the network.